Will online video kill the SEO industry that relies on text to drive search engine indexing?

Not likely, thanks to Google. Very soon, online video is going to be an even bigger tool for marketing your company, brand, product or service.

Online video has been great if someone stumbles upon your site or YouTube posting. If you went viral, you could make a lot of noise. However, search engine marketing (SEM) is where the real power of online marketing is right now, and video is largely on the sidelines because no one can search for the content in videos. You can put tags on the videos, but the keyword richness of a video is lost in today’s search indexing.

Google is working hard to change this. First they bought YouTube, a fantastic move that will pay off massively considering the next move. Google is going to transcribe and index the words spoken in online videos.

Now you can publish your video ads, customer testimonials, product demos, ect. on YouTube (or anywhere) and Google will index the content, whether its spoken or displayed as text. Consider how many keywords are in a two minute overview of your product. This is SEM gold.

The biggest challenge to SEM is producing fresh, relevant content for the search engines to index. Once you get over the technical and production hurdles, video may become the easiest method to produce tons of relevant content.

UPDATE

Here is a nice technique that works today. Transcribe your own videos and upload them using YouTube’s Captioning capability (aka subtitles). The text of the speaker’s words will appear over the video. The best part? This text is indexed by Google.

BIG UPDATE November 2009

Google has formally announced that they will be auto-captioning YouTube videos! This is big news that will make videos an essential tool for all online marketers. Video after the break.

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1. What’s the big deal about social media?
2. Google Product Search tips